A New Friend
by Psycho Clown Bondage Circus
Summary: Rachel meets a very strange clown.
1. Chapter 1

Rachel Holloway was the new girl to Derry High School and had only one friend, her friend Jamie. They were both considered to be weird girls for dressing shabby and playing video games like boys. Jamie also had short hair and dressed like a tomboy so many other kids made fun of her.

Rachel always wore sporty but bright clothes. She loved bright colors and her personality was bubbly but she could be deeply serious when she wanted to. She was also very pretty, with bright blue eyes and golden blonde hair, that was her mother's color that was born to her as well.

The popular girls in school hated both their guts and always made fun of them. Jamie would get mad. Rachel didn't notice the hurtful words because she ignored them, preferring to only think more about things she enjoyed and made her happy. She often had very narrow thoughts about things sometimes and got distracted. She was autistic. Sometimes she could blank out the whole world if she wanted to and only focus on one thing. That thing was usually drawing her favorite subjects from what she saw around her. She was very good at art, although she didn't think she had much talent. Jamie always told her she was her own worst critic.

Rachel and Jamie were walking in the hallway after the bell rang for school to be out one day. She bumped into Richie Tozier who was trying to hurry down the hallway with his friends who's names she didn't know yet. One of them might have been named Eddie. She thought he was cute. He seemed very paranoid about everything, including germs. Richie and him were usually always together.

"Coming through, one side!" Richie yelled out funny.

Rachel thought he was trying to hide his nervous with comedy and turns out that creepy Patrick Hocksettler was making sexual threats to him again. Gross.

"That boy Patrick is bad news with always hitting on everyone who doesn't like him," said Rachel walking up to Jamie who was pulling out her books from the locker and looking like she really wanted to get home fast.

"Of course no one would like him. He's a freak. He's also a disgusting pervert who will grope anyone, male or female. I even heard he sticks cute animals into a refrigerator in the dump and watches them suffocate. He has no soul."

"Everyone has a soul, Jamie. Even evil people. Theirs is just tainted by something bad that happened to them."

"He's still gross. Kind of hot though. With those tight pants." Jamie pushed up her very thick glasses onto her nose. Rachel stared at her questioningly. "You didn't hear me say that! Come on let's get out of here. I hate school."

The girls walked outside into the fresh air with the sun shining.

"Hey you should come to my house and play Super Mario Bros. 2, Rachel," Jamie said.

"You always want to play SMB2," Rachel said.

"I like it. It's called Doki Doki Panic in Japan."

"I have to do chores for my grandma first."

"She works you like a dog you know. You are a regular Cinderella."

"Not really. My grandma is nice."

"You're just saying that because you have Stockholm Syndrome."

"I do not!"

"Yeah."

"Well she's my only family after my parents died in the car crash when I was 5 years old."

"I know. But that doesn't change the fact that she's very controlling to you and you don't seem to see it." Jamie pretended to knock on her friend's head. "Sunny! With her head in the clouds all day long, where everything is fine and nothing is ever bad. I swear, you could find the silver lining in anyone, even Hitler."

Rachel laughed and pushed her friend's hand away. She reached up and smoothed her golden curls back into place. "That's not true. Not everyone. Just people I think have potential to be kind inside, deep down. Grandma is a good person inside. She's just very old and has many health problems."

"She probably knew Hitler personally back in the day."

"Gross! My grandma did not personally know Hitler."

"You're right. She's so old she probably personally knew Judas."

They both laughed.

"Okay, I've got to go then bye Jamie," said Rachel. She walked in a different direction as she waved goodbye to Jamie.

"Later, gater!" Jamie walked away down the street.

Rachel walked down the street to her house. Along the way she had to pass 29 Neibolt street. Every day she passed it and nothing ever happened.

But today something weird happened.

Today she saw a red balloon tied to the fence post. It wasn't even moving in the wind, which was really, really weird. That she didn't notice at first. When she did, she thought it was actually cool. She slowed down and stared at it.

"How is that even working?" Rachel looked around. The wind was obviously blowing. The balloon should have been wiggling in the wind. Nope. It remained perfectly still.

"What the fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck," she mused, smiling. "What kind of balloon does that?"

She walked over to it. The air seemed to be calling her name. Like the voices of little happy children were singing around but she couldn't see them. It was like she only heard them in her head.

"Oranges and lemons," they sang. "Say the bells of St. Clement's."

Weird, Rachel thought. She felt drawn to the Neibolt street house. It reminded her of a haunted house. She had heard rumors before that it was haunted. But she didn't think ghosts were evil. So she didn't think she was in any danger.

She walked through the open gate, slowly, and across the path to the yard. There was sunflowers growing in the tall dead grass and weeds. Rachel liked the colors. They were very bright.

Her mom enjoyed sunflowers. That was how she got her nickname, Sunny. Only three people ever called her that. Her mom, her grandma, and Jamie. When she was only a toddler, she used to play in her mother's sunflower garden while her mother was gardening. Her mother used to sing songs. Rachel remembered them and felt a little sad.

"Sunny," the voice whispered.

She gasped and turned around. "Mom?" There was no way that could have been her mom's voice. But it sounded like it was. Now she got nervous. She saw another balloon tied to the house's open backdoor. The door was literally opening in front of her. It creeked. It was like it was saying "Come on in!"

"Holy shit, this house might really be haunted after all," Rachel said under her breathe.

Her legs wouldn't move backward. They only wanted to go closer. She couldn't resist. She slowly walked to the open doorway, staring at the perfectly stationary red balloon tied to the doorknob.

"Okay, this is stupid, yes, I know. But I can't stop."

It could have been a prank. Or maybe ghosts were real and they were playing with her.

Soon she began to smell something that made her shocked but happy. She smelled pizza. Not just any pizza, but her favorite kind. Pepperoni and anchovies from Papa Mario's, her favorite Italian restaurant. It had a very peculiar scent and that was totally it. She smelled it when she went through the doorway, though there was the scent of old wood and the house and dust beneath it. The pizza scent was very strong.

And then she saw a rat crawling on the nearby furniture and backed away.

"Gross. I would definitely not want to eat pizza from Papa Mario's in a place like this," she muttered. "It's dirty and infested. And besides, this is all in my head anyway. There's no way somebody has Papa Mario's pizza in here, plus no way it's going to be my favorite toppings."

The door slammed shut behind her. She jumped a little. She gasped and ran to the door. The knob wasn't moving the door locked somehow. Now she was stuck.

"Okay, let me out!" Rachel demanded. "This isn't funny."

Something fell in the distance. Rachel whipped her head around and turned to face it. She saw some little kid wearing a hooded white sweatshirt. It was a little boy, maybe 6 or 7 years old. He had blue eyes and bright orange hair. He was smiling at her, mischievously. He giggled. Then he ran away.

"Hey, wait!"

Rachel ran after him.

"Now I know somebody's messing with me," she said as she cautiously followed after the weird kid, feeling that she would end up bumping into some kids from school hanging out with their little brother and trying to have fun by pranking somebody out of boredom. "I swear, if this is a joke, it's not very funny. It's just really lame."

The little boy's voice giggled.

"You owe me five farthings, say the bells of St. Martin's."

There was the kid's voices singing, sounding more like they were echoing inside her head instead of being sung by children in the room.

The boy giggled again. Rachel heard footsteps going down some stairs. She hurried and followed them, seeing the boy jump into the nearby well in the bottom of the house's basement.

"Holy fuck, kid, don't!" Rachel practically screamed.

She was certain she just watched some poor little kid commit accidental suicide by trying to play hide and seek in a dangerous place.

She gasped and ran over to the well, peering down into it. It was black without any flashlight to see. But there was a rope and pulley that used to be where the bucket for the well was held, about a million years ago. It looked sturdy. She grabbed onto it. Maybe she could rescue him.

"Hello? Kid?"

"Hi."

Rachel looked down, squinting into the darkness. She saw a light in the tunnel. The kid was sticking his head out of it. He giggled again and waved up at her.

"What the heck are you doing down there? Don't you know that's dangerous!" Rachel gasped.

"Wanna come down and play with me?" the boy suggested.

"Are you crazy, kid? Down in the sewer? Here, how about you come up and we'll play outside, and maybe I'll escort you back to your parents," Rachel offered more sanely. "I'm sure they'd be worried sick about you if they knew you were messing around here."

"I don't have any parents," the little boy said plainly as he stuck one of his fingers into his mouth and sucked on it. "I'm all alone." He pouted. "I just wanted someone to play with." Then he withdrew back into the tunnel.

"Wait, kid! Don't go!" she called.

Rachel didn't know whether he was fibbing or not, but she kind of felt bad now for this kid. It wasn't really normal for a kid to be running around in an abandoned house or going down into a well that connected to some old sewer tunnels. Maybe she had hurt his feelings. Maybe he was a real orphan who only wanted to play and he didn't understand normal things. Sometimes she had a hard time understanding normal things and had to have her friend Jamie or Grandma explain them for them to make sense.

"Well as long as I'm doing crazy things today," she said as she got on the rope and started to go down into the well. She might as well not stop there.

She went down the rope and got into the tunnel, walking down the dimly lit tunnel into the sewer. It was creepy and it smelled, but not as bad as she imagined it would have before she came down into there. The sound of dripping water was everywhere. A flashlight would have been perfect for this situation. Too bad she didn't have one.

Then she saw a balloon.

This one wasn't tied to anything. It was floating straight towards her, slowly, and steadily. It was weird that it was moving in illogical ways again, floating with no wind at all, directly toward her without stopping and at a set pace.

Rachel stared at it cautiously.

"Here comes a candle to light you to bed," sand the children, feeling like they were right in both of her ears.

Her heart began to beat rapidly as she heard the little boy's giggled behind her.

"And here comes a chopper to chop off your head."

The balloon popped, making her jump when she saw what was behind it that she now could plainly see, and she fell down into the dirty water on her hands and knees.

She grimaced. Her clothes were soaked in God only knew what, whatever the liquid in the sewer was made up of. She hoped it wasn't gray water, or worse, black water.

The mess on her clothes wasn't the worst part of this situation, no. She saw a clown suddenly standing there when the balloon popped.

A tall clown. Dressed in a silvery white suit with big red-orange pom pom buttons on the front, and frilly cuffs on the wrists and ankles. His hair was bright orange and curled up in swoops. His face was done up in white makeup with a painted red nose, red lips, and red marks going up along the corners of the lips and across the eyes. And his eyes were a bright yellow. Not a natural color.

"Chip chop chip chop the last man is dead," said Pennywise, making cutting motions with his left hand, and then he laughed. "Hi, Sunny. Thanks for coming to play." Drool spilled from between his red lips.

Rachel shuddered at first. What the hell was wrong with this guy? Was he even a human? He didn't look like it. He looked like a monster pretending to be a human dressed up as a clown. Nothing about this guy was normal from first sight, right away. Something screamed off in every way possible. What a bad disguise.

"Wh-who-who are y-y-ou?" Rachel stammered until she could get her words controlled. "Where's that kid?"

"I'm Pennywise," he said, and shook his head a little, making the sound of bells jingling. It looked like he was spazzing out or something. Or maybe he was just happy. "The dancing clown!"

"What the fuck are you doing in a sewer tunnel," Rachel wondered, he voice now sounding angry. Why the heck are you scaring the shit out of people for no reason, was what she wanted to say, but it was inside her head at this time. She put her hands on her hips. "And how did you know my special nickname?"

"I live here. And I know lots of things."

"Oh yeah? Do you know how close I am to kicking your ass?"

Pennywise giggled at the half-baked threat. Rachel recognized it as being the same as the little boy's, but in a different voice.

"Come float with us, Sunny," said the children's voices.

"I don't want to float!" Rachel screamed. "I want to get the fuck out of here and get home and change my clothes, which are now dirty, thanks a lot!"

"Float," the children sung in their mocking tones.

"We all float down here," said Pennywise.

He started to dance from one foot to the other in a silly way that looked like he wasn't trying all that hard to be good at it. It was mostly taunting.

"Fuck this, I am leaving!" Rachel stated firmly. She turned around and ran for the end of the tunnel and the rope leading up. She gasped when she saw the rope was gone. Somebody had pulled it back up. "Are you kidding me?"

She felt like crying.

She slowly turned around, knowing the weird clown guy would be right there, breathing down her neck.

There wasn't anyone there.

Rachel's heart stopped racing a mile a minute. She placed her hand over her chest and took some deep breaths.

"Okay, calm down. There's probably a rational explanation for all of this that I can't wrap my head around good enough yet," she said to herself, trying to remain calm. "I will eventually, though. I promise. Heck, it might be toxic sewer gas fumes that I've been breathing in that are causing me to hallucinate."

"Flooooooooooat," Pennywise's voice mocked from behind her.

"Nope," she said, not bothering to turn around. "You're not real. You're a bad hallucination."

"If I was a hallucination, could I do this?" the voice hissed at her, sounding like it was right by her ear, and slightly more pissed off than in laughing mood now. She felt fingers lightly poke her shoulder and gasped. "Look down. Hee hee!"

Rachel thought she might have just made the biggest mistake of her life as she looked down and saw several huge centipedes wiggling around her sneakers. Her face went pale while memories of a centipede crawling into her crib as a baby penetrated her head.

She screamed bloody murder and passed out.


	2. Chapter 2

Wow I'm shocked this even got some follows and stuff, lmao! I'm not that good a writer. Okay, here's some more! :)

* * *

Rachel dreamed of her mother and father. It was a surprisingly good dream, a sweet dream, like the ones she used to have when she was younger.

She dreamed a memory, replaying it in her lucid subconscious, the memory of going to the beach and holding both their hands while they ran into the waves. In the dream, she remembered how scared she was of the water at first. It was everywhere and it stretched forever, endlessly, on and on, making her believe she would be swallowed up and lost. At the same time, she was thrilled by it, awed by it's sheer size and power.

She felt the confidence in both her mother and father's hands grasping her own. They wouldn't willingly lead her into any danger. She felt safe. They all splashed into the water and laughed and played. Time didn't exist anymore.

The dream seemed so real, she could smell the salt in the air and feel the spray of the water on her face.

Then she slowly woke up. The dream slipped away. Back into her chest of buried subconscious memories. She had pushed them away and instead replaced them with several narrow fleeting obsessions to occupy her time.

Rachel groaned and blinked her eyes a few times, realizing she did feel real drops of wetness on her face.

"What," she grunted, sitting up slowly, her vision quite bleary. It was dark and wet. She felt water droplets on her head and looked up, seeing that they were dripping down from some pipes above.

She found herself in huge cistern area of the sewer, very spacious, and laying down near the wall. How she got there, she couldn't recall. Several catch basins of water dotted the area, water flowing down into them in quiet streams. They never seemed to fill up. Two were empty, the pipes leading into pitch blackness, who knew how much farther below. Possibly miles down into the earth. The place smelled musky, dank, and dirty. Something about it felt like an animal's den. "Where am I?"

Rachel moved to her feet, stumbling. She felt as if she'd be drugged. There was no memory of what happened for several minutes, then it all came flowing back, like water from a clogged pipe. A trickle at first, then a full blast. She gasped.

Kidnapped, was her first coherant memory. By some tall guy dressed up as a mischievous and decidedly malicious clown. And then an adrenaline rush struck her.

"No way," Rachel said, stumbling again for her footing. The floor was covered in junk, she realized only too late, after she tripped over something and nearly fell. Once she balanced herself again, she looked down and saw a child's toy train against her foot, lying on its side. "Huh?"

Reaching down, she picked it up gently from the ground and inspected it. It looked ancient, something she'd only seen images of from the 1930s. And then as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw there was more. Toys and clothes, wagons and high chairs, dolls and bicycle parts, baseball bats, clubs, rackets, and balls of every assortment all children's, littered the area surrounding her.

And that wasn't all. She turned around and stared up, gaping at a gigantic tower made of the same haphazardly stacked items, tons of them, a collection of sorts, climbing all the way to the ceiling several dozen feet high, in ways that would be impossible for normal gravity to keep the tower's shape for long. It hurt her brain to look at it.

"What the," Rachel muttered. She was certain she saw some of the pieces of the weird tower actually floating around it, having come loose from their positions, yet for some reason not subscribing to normal laws of physics. She backed away, grabbing her head. It ached badly. She rubbed circles into her temples. "Now I know I'm hallucinating. This can't possibly be real."

There was a circus wagon underneath everything. Rachel almost didn't notice it before, she was too busy staring at the physics defying tower of junk. Now she couldn't take her eyes off it. It was as worn as most of the decorations in the place, looking like a relic from long past. Maybe the 30s or even earlier than that. She couldn't tell. The name on the side of the wagon read "Pennywise, the Dancing Clown" in bold letters, with the clown's smiling face painted in long faded paint. A soft orange glow came from the half open door at the opposite end.

Rachel groaned. She couldn't think straight. It hurt too much. Her head was fuzzy, buzzing with incomprehensible sounds. She wandered around, looking and feeling like she didn't know what to do or where to go. Suddenly turned into an old woman with a sudden onset of dementia, her body aching and she couldn't remembered the names and faces of her loved ones any longer. This must have felt like what her grandma felt on bad days. Rachel didn't like the feeling one bit. She wanted her youth back, her sanity, her freedom. How did she get in this crazy nightmare?

"Remember, remember," she chanted.

"Come float, Sunny."

There was the voice again. The voices.

Now she remembered more than ever, thanks to the voices. It jerked her memory instantly. "Why did you bring me here? Where are you?"

"Here," Pennywise breathed into her left ear.

Rachel let out a sharp, short shriek and skittered away, hands in the air until she turned around, slapping them down at her sides. Pennywise was right there a few feet away, no sound, she hadn't seem him walk up or anything. How the hell did he do it? There was water all over the floor. In large puddles. He would have made some kind of wet splash no matter how softly he tried to tip-toe.

"What the fuck!"

The clown's smile turned into a frown that made him look almost offended. "You still think I'm not real?"

He practically pouted, reminding her of a small petulant child. Rachel immediately thought of the little boy.

Then he looked angry. Rachel immediately got worried about that expression.

"You'll float with us. You'll float forever," he snarled. He opened his mouth and made a sort of hiss, cold and snakelike.

"What the fuck is your floating obsession?" Rachel spat without thinking, half-crazed at this point. This wasn't a dream, it was real. It was real, even though it made no sense, and everything was wrong, and she was in danger.

She whipped her head around and saw a golf club on the ground. For a split-second, her eyes met Pennywise's creepy yellow ones, and they locked on each other's gaze, wordlessly. Pennywise had a little smirk on his lips. Like he knew what she was going to do before she tried it. "Go ahead, do it," his face said. "If you think you can." Taunting.

Rachel rushed and dove for the golf club, grabbing it. She held it up as a weapon.

"You just keep your distance!" she threatened, and was embarrassed that anyone could tell she was all bravado by the uncertainty of her voice. It was high and frantic. "I mean it!"

The clown giggled and took a single step forward, mockingly.

"I really mean it!" she screamed. "I'll bash your freaking skull in! I'll do it!" She was lying. The thought of it made her sick. She would be able to bonk him on the head and knock him out, at best. At worst, he'd take the club away and make her sorry she even thought of it in the first place.

Another step. Now he had the biggest smile on his face, the corners of his eyes crinkling with glee.

"Please," she choked out helplessly. "Don't!"

Why was this happening? Oh, right. Because she went into the haunted house and chased a weird giggling ghost kid into the sewer. It was her own fault.

Pennywise began to do some freaky thing, clenching up, going into a convulsion, and for a second Rachel thought luck had graced her, he was having some random seizure and would pass out soon, but the clown began to snarl and make a horrifyingly inhuman sound that chilled her to the bone. It rose up in his throat, and then he shot out towards her in a way that was impossible for a normal human, moving around erratically.

A piercing scream tore it's way out of Rachel's throat. This is it, this is how I die, she thought, the scream the only thing she heard besides the predatory howling scream of Pennywise the clown, who was surely not a human at all, Rachel realized only too late, as he lunged at her in the time it took to blink.

Now there was high-pitched laughter mixing in with her screams. And hands grabbing her face, smushing her cheeks, forcing her head up even as she tried to turn away. The golf club had long since fallen from her hand and clattered to the ground near her left leg as she had collapsed on her ass, Pennywise crouching over her, pawing at her face and drooling all over her.

"GET OFF ME!" Rachel yelled through lips pressed together like a fish mouth thanks to the groping hands of the clown. She struggled to free herself from his lunatic grip.

The clown continued to laugh at her shrieks. She struggled harder, fighting with all her strength, but it wasn't enough. He grabbed both her wrists and held them, his grip also inhuman.

"STOP! LET ME GO!"

"Never," Pennywise said flatly, chirping out an accompanying giggle. "Your fear is the sweetest I've tasted in years, so hidden deep inside and long forgotten, but now it bubbles to the surface! So many layers. So many flavors." His voice changed from high pitched and childish to a guttural baritone, like an animal, in an instant. "I will feast well on you."

There was a burst of energy that overcame her without warning. Whether it was pure adrenaline or something else, Rachel used it to her advantage, knowing if she didn't, she was probably a goner. "Feast on this!" Rachel kicked him in the stomach, not knowing what else to do, or if it would even work.

It worked. Pennywise let out an "Oof" and looked briefly stunned. It gave her enough time to scramble away from him a few feet. The monster clown growled and let out a roar.

Rachel screamed again, running with all her might at the nearest open tunnel doorway out. She could hear the freak clown behind her and gaining. She heard something worse when she made it into the tunnel, looking over her shoulder in time to see a nightmarish giant rusty red centipede skittering across the ground, headed right for her. Another ear-shattering blast of fear came out of her mouth. She fell into the tunnel, soaking her clothes in dark, dank water, and splashed down the tunnel, hoping she wouldn't pass out.

I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, her mind chanted.

She kept going without looking back, certain the centipede who had once been a freakish clown with glowing yellow eyes and a bad attitude would sink its pincers into her back soon enough. But the attack never came.

Somehow, she made it to a long tunnel that she ran down for what felt like hours, though it was about seven minutes. It ended with an old iron ladder going up to a pipe jutting halfway out of the earth. Luckily the cover of the pipe had been pushed off. Light from outside spilled into the tunnel shaft as Rachel neared the top. She could even hear the sounds of birds singing in the distance. Heaven, she thought.

With one last short scream, this time one of victory, she popped her head through the mouth of the pipe and fell over the edge, landing on soft, slightly overgrown grass.

She was in one piece. Alive. Alive!

"Oh my God," she breathed. Her heart felt ready to burst out of her chest. "I made it. I fucking made it!" She started laughing crazily. "What a horrible nightmare."

That was all it was. Just a hallucination. She fell into the sewer tunnel somehow, after wandering around in that stupid house on Neibolt. She inhaled some toxic gas or airborne spore, wandered around in the tunnels imagining shadows in the darkness thanks to her growing panic about being lost, then finally found her way out. That was all. A passing nightmare, a fever daydream. Those thoughts were far more comforting than the truth she knew deep inside her rapidly beating heart.

"Holy shit, somebody came out of the pipe. I told you."

Rachel recognized the voice. It was Richie Tozier.

She looked over to some trees where Richie and Eddie were walking out of the clearing, two other boys along with them. One with somewhat boring hair, a regular athletic build, and one kind of fat, but with an innocent looking baby face. Richie was holding a big stick, the tip of which was covered in mud.

"Are y-y-you okay?" asked the athletic one, dressed in a blue t-shirt and gray gym shorts. He seemed very sincere.

"Yeah, you look like shit warmed over," said Richie. He pushed up his glasses with the free hand.

Rachel didn't know what to answer. "Yes," she finally said. "I'm fine." God, was she ever lying.

"What were you doing in the sewer pipe?" asked Richie.

"Those are so dangerous to fuck around in, you know. They're full of gray water. That's water mixed up with piss and shit. And you could get lost down there," said Eddie, his voice filled with repulsion. He grimaced at Rachel's clothes. "And there's so many bacterial borne diseases, I don't even wanna think about it." He spoke often with his hands, almost wildly.

Rachel looked down and realized she was soaked with hopefully not gray water. But definitely something awful. So gross. Wet and filth from the sewer. All over her skin. Seeing her must have really spiked up Eddie's germophobia. She almost felt worse for him instead of herself.

"Oh God, I need a shower," she moaned. What was she doing in the sewer pipe? Surely not running from a giant centipede who had previously somehow been a freakishly evil looking clown. No way. Who would believe that story? "I was chased by some guy," she blurted out in response to Richie. "I ran through the sewer to get away from him."

"Oh shit. Some pedo?" Eddie gasped.

"What did he l-l-look like?" asked the kid with the stutter.

"He looked like," Rachel began, pausing for thought, and all of the thoughts were racing around in her head.

A clown.

A clown with yellow eyes and teeth like a wild animal's. One who had a giant gravity defying tower of children's toys down in a huge cistern in the sewer. One who moved at inhuman speed and did inhuman things. A clown who turned into a lonely little boy to lure her into its clutches, and then a giant centipede to try and kill her. Pennywise the Dancing Clown, he called himself. He wanted to eat her fear.

How insane. No one would believe that! They'd say she was crazy.

"I don't know. I didn't see him that well. He was just some guy. Some guy with red hair. And a white outfit."

"Creepy. You should definitely go to the cops," Eddie suggested.

"W-we'll go with you there, if you want," the stuttering guy said.

"Yeah, we should all be going, far away from here," Eddie chimed in. "I don't wanna be around if there's some nutjob attacking kids hanging around these parts, just waiting for new victims. I'm not gonna become a statistic. You know how many missing kids we've had already in this fucking town!"

"Calm down, Eds." Richie patted Eddie on the back. "Take a breath before you lose your shit."

"This is fucking serious!" He whipped an inhaler out of his fanny pack. "You don't treat this kind of thing like a joke. My mom's friend, a friend of a friend, actually, had a sister who almost got kidnapped in the 70s because she didn't listen to the warnings that there was some fucking weird guy hanging around the mall who kept trying to pick up girls with brown hair, like specifically brown hair, and-"

Rachel tuned out the cute but steadily more annoying motormouth, feeling suddenly tired and miserable. She wanted to be alone, but she was lucky that these kids were here. She couldn't shake the feeling that if she'd been all alone when she came out of the pipe the clown would have been standing there, waiting for her. Smiling. Laughing. The thought made her shudder.

"Um, I have to go. I have to get home," Rachel said. Exhaustion came through her voice, thick and smothering. "Oh, and thanks. But I'll go to the police myself. Later. When I get my shit together. I just gotta deal with this for a minute. Okay?"

The stuttering guy nodded.

"Thanks," she said again, breathlessly. She stopped and turned around, remembering politeness was a thing. These guys had shown her enough kindness to not make fun of her and actually seemed interested in her well being, even though she didn't know them well. "I'm Rachel Holloway. Um. I know you, Richie. Tozier, right?"

Richie nodded. "Guilty as charged."

"And you're Eddie-" She didn't know his last name.

"Kaspbrak," Eddie finished for her, hands raised up like a defense.

"Rachel nodded. "Right." She turned to the other two. "But who are you guys?"

"I'm B-B-Buh-Bill Denbrough."

"Ben Hanscom."

"Nice to m-m-muh-meet you," said Bill.

"Yeah, sorry it's under such weird circumstances," said Richie.

"Yeah, me too," Rachel said, looking mildly embarrassed. "So, um. What were you guys doing down here in the Barrens?"

"Trying to build a dam," said Ben.

"But we fucked it up," said Richie. He swung his stick like a baseball bat.

"You fucked it up," said Eddie, looking annoyed.

"Yeah, okay, maybe I did, but Benny Boy here will fix it proper, right, Ben?" Richie put on a British accent while speaking, putting his arm around Ben's shoulders.

Ben nodded. "Despite all the damage, I should be able to, yeah."

Richie gestured at him. "See? Saved by the Haystack." He finally dropped the stick, raised his hands up and began bowing in reverence to Ben. "All hail the Almighty Haystack! Builder of indestructible dams! How does he do it? He just does. It's a gift."

Ben looked both embarrassed and modest at Richie's dramatic boast.

Rachel found herself laughing softly. The guys seemed really nice. She'd only known them for a brief time, but it was like they'd told her their life's story in only a few sentences and actions.

"That's cool," Rachel said, having nothing better to say besides that. As friendly as she was, she wasn't much for striking up good conversation with people she didn't know well. And truth be told, she didn't feel like talking much about anything at the moment. All she wanted to do was get home, shower, change clothes, and rest for a while. "Well. I'm gonna go now. I'll see you guys at school, maybe?"

"Yeah, see you around, Rachel," said Bill.

"Make sure you disinfect any wounds," said Eddie. "Seriously."

"Bye," said Ben.

"Watch out for the man in white," Richie said in an ominous horror show narrator voice, waving his hands around dramatically. Eddie shot him a glare. "What? Everyone knows gingers don't have souls. It's a fair warning."

Rachel shook her head, smiling. She silently waved at them as she turned and walked away. She knew her way through the Barrens, back to civilization. It wasn't all that far. Shaken as she was, she didn't require an escort for safety.

Somehow, in a way she couldn't explain, she felt that the clown-man-centipede-thing wouldn't chase her anymore after simply meeting these boys. It was as if by fate she had stumbled upon the group.

Something in the back of her mind, something she remembered from her early childhood, another voice, one from long ago assured her. This one was kind. An old voice, tired, but soft and sympathetic, and very wise. The voice of the grandpa she never had, but she knew that's what he'd sound like if she did.

"Keep them in your thoughts. You'll be fine," he said quietly.

The clown didn't show up. She made it all the way back to her house in one piece. Soon, Rachel started to wonder if it really was all a hallucination or bad daydream caused by her vivid imagination and a state of panic at being lost somewhere dark and foreboding. Either way, she never wanted to go near the Neibolt house or the sewers again.

Rachel washed away the grime and the bad feelings in the shower, then came back to her room, fell onto her bed, face first. Completely exhausted, both in mind and body. She turned her head and looked at the clock. It was only 4:04pm. She wanted to sleep forever. There was still a ton of homework to do. Thank God it was Friday.

And she still had to do those chores for her Granny. She had a hard time explaining to her why she was home so late from school, and it would have been worse if grandma had seen her clothing. Rachel slipped into the bathroom before anything happened. Grandma was resting in her Lazyboy in front of the TV with one of her favorite daytime talk shows on, Phil Donahue, so she wasn't in the mood to move too far or ask too many invasive questions of Rachel, thank goodness.

"What a day," Rachel muttered. "I just want to sleep."

She picked up the framed photo of her with her parents from off the dresser and held it. She always looked at it before bed. It was a ritual for her. She didn't really remember them anymore, her memories had been sort of repressed due to trauma. The photo always caused some buried memories to surface.

The photo was of them all at a beach. She couldn't remember exactly which one. It was a nice one, anyway. They were wading in the water, smiling at the camera, a blue sky with puffy white clouds in the background, and the endless crystal waters surrounding them on all sides. Rachel, only four years old, was in between them.

Her fingertip touched the photo.

Then she jerked it back, startled. She felt wetness.

She thought she did.

But she couldn't have. Could she?

Rachel's heart began to beat. She glanced at the tip of her finger and saw, very clearly, and her heart beat fast and faster, eyes widening, that there was a small glistening bead of fresh water on her fingertip. But that was impossible.

To make things worse, then she heard the sound of an ocean. Waves sloshing against a sandy beach. Sea gulls crying in the distance. She began to gasp for breath.

Staring into the photo, she could see the water start to move, rippling. The sun shining on the waves. The clouds slowly traveling in the background. It was so real. She could smell the salt in the air.

And then she saw it.

In the background of the photo, behind her parents and herself who remained trapped, frozen in the photo, she saw the terrible moving shadow. Like a great white shark breaking the surface of the water and looming in for a kill on unsuspecting prey, the clown rose from the water, his orange hair matted wetly to his forehead, yellow eyes locked forward, staring right up at her. They slowly spaced out until he was looking in every direction at once, making her shudder unconsciously. His red lips were slack at first, his stare utterly blank and distant, but then he smiled.

"Thought you could get away from me, Sunny?" he said through the photo which had suddenly, inexplicably become real life, save for the original subjects in the photo, stationary like cardboard cutouts. The frozen smile on her young face made her want to scream. How can I look so happy with that thing right next to me? Rachel shuddered helplessly again. "You can't because I'm everywhere. Chasing you will be such fun. I love cat and mouse." He lisped as he spoke certain words.

"No, this isn't happening," Rachel told herself. Her hands were now trembling. "This was a bad dream."

Rachel blinked against her will, and suddenly she had been removed from the photo. Instead, there was Pennywise, his arms stretched out along the shoulders of her mother and father.

"We're going to have a lot of fun together," Pennywise said in his eerily childish voice. "Yes we will!" He broke into his familiar high-pitched spiel of laughter.

"NO!"

In the heat of the moment, full of a mix of anger and fright, Rachel threw the photo. It landed on the floor and she heard the glass frame crack.

The laughter had stopped.

When she looked down, she saw a small trail of water had leaked from the photo. Inching towards it, she picked it up like it was a dead rat and flipped it over. The photo was normal. She had returned to the center, between her parents. She, her mother and father, and the silent waves remained frozen in time as they were. There was a small crack in the glass of the frame where the water was leaking from. Luckily, there wasn't anything else. No more realistic water pouring out. Most of all, no crazed killer clown.

"Keep them in your thoughts," the old man's voice encouraged from deep in her subconscious. "Chin up."

Rachel instantly thought of Richie, Eddie, Bill, and Ben, going to her bed once again, pulling her knees to her chest. After a few minutes of sitting and reflecting on the boys she'd met that day, the fear vanished.

"I didn't want to go into that house. He made me. It's not my fault."

It wasn't her fault, and she now knew she'd been tricked into going into the Neibolt house, which was in fact haunted, by a fucking demon clown, no less, but now that she had, she knew she'd been somehow marked. That clown wasn't going to leave her alone without a fight. But she didn't like fighting. She hated it. She hated what she had been thrown into. She wouldn't play the clown's game of cat and mouse, that was for sure.

So what was she going to do?

Maybe the old man's voice would tell her.

For now, all she heard was relatively peaceful and very welcome silence. She closed her eyes and tried to calm down.


End file.
